Tales of Slud - Prologue, Part I - How the Entire Universe of Slud was Created, and how Both a Planet and a Man Got That Name
Tales of Slud, Prologue, Part 1 - "How the entire Universe of Slud was created. And how both a planet and a man also got that name."
In the Beginning, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. You would not believe how empty the place was. Like, think of something. Anything you choose. An apple. A cute little puppy. The 3rd law of thermodynamics...That didn't exist. It wasn't there. Because there was nothing. Quite literally nothing.
And then, the Universe came to Be, for much the same reason, many wise people throughout countless centuries have been driven to confess somewhat ruefully, that any universe is created; That is to say, a dry and very poignant boredom was the reason. That, and also because there was a consciousness to perceive it. But mostly it was just the boredom...and by the use of that particular term, the author of this book intends to convey a general picture of the most dreadful tedium, as if that of a bad dream which never really seems to end until at one time, for one reason or another, it does. Such, the author has noticed, can be called "life" and indeed is called "life" by many, many tongues, and many more fingertips.
Such a terrible, wearisome boredom exerts a certain pressure upon many individuals to create things as a means of an at least temporary escape, and that attempt to escape from the horrendous tedium of mundane existence, it is thought by many of the scientists of our world, provided the impetus for the very existence of our Universe.
Thus, Behold! Upon one Thursday night in the subjective time and space of a Creator, there appeared a being known only as The D.M., shapeless and formless, and as small and yet as vast as a single thought, and for the first time, there was something. For The D.M. had come forth with a Will to create, and thus the Universe was no longer empty, nor was it Void, nor meaningless, nor uninhabited, but it had a population of one, and that one was He who had come forth to create.
And the Thought of The D.M. called forth into being the Universe in all its potential, as if it were a great Mansion that had not yet been built, whose outermost walls had been fashioned as a sort of boundary to everything, although the inside remained as yet unfilled. And The D.M. looked upon the boundaries of the Universe that He had created, and He thought that It was good...enough. Sort of an underachiever, that D.M.
But eventually, the idea within the mind of The D.M. changed, and He took thought once again for the shapeless vision that He had caused to come into existence, that it should not remain so very empty, but that it should rather be filled with all sorts of objects of existence. And it is known, as well as any being can ever know anything, that within the worlds and the Universe that He has created, the Thought of The D.M. is reality, as He wills it, so that He can create a thing out of nothing save His Thought alone, whenever He so desires it. And nothing at all within the structure of the Universe (if it can truly be said that He gave the Universe any such thing as structure, or, at the very least, a structure which makes sense) has got its existence but that it has its uttermost source within the thought of The D.M. It should be noted that the preceding fact has caused no small amount of consternation among the ranks of the Enlightened.
But it is a widely accepted theory, posited from countless centuries of basic observation, that The D.M., the God of the whole Universe of Slud, is lazy and sometimes a little bit lacking in common sense. Such, of course, explains the fact that He, in His lack of common sense, had not bothered to devote enough energy to the research of optimal Time-Progression patterns before he got down to the business of creation, and even thus He ended up creating the Universe somewhere in the Middle of the Progression of its Time instead of starting at the Beginning as would a sensible creator, were they given to the process of Creation in place of The D.M.
Subtitle: "He's got the whole world in His...Oops"
And in His laziness, He then decided it would be a good idea to leave the notion of Time Progression up to others to try to figure it out. After all, He had seen that He had made a terrible mess of Time, and He shuddered at the amount of work that would be necessary to fix it. Better to let someone else deal with that headache. And this, then, was the First Mistake of the D.M., that primary error from which all the chaotic strands of history were thereafter (or therebefore) woven.
It has followed from that First Mistake that the Progression of Time of that Universe has, as a consequence, flowed equally in all directions from that mistake, so that the past and the future are actually created and even experienced simultaneously, as they ripple outward in all directions from that primordial Mistake that The D.M., lacking in common sense, had made, and being lazy, had put off fixing. And it has generally been thought by the largest majority of the creatures who have dwelt within that Universe, that the whole process of Time Progression was, as a result, needlessly complicated, entirely inconvenient and even counterproductive to the processes of evolution, for reasons all too apparent.
But when The D.M. had gotten enough of the Time issue sorted out for life to more-or-less function and be somewhat viable, He got to work creating things. For sometimes, The D.M. in addition to being lazy and lacking in common sense can be somewhat impatient, or so many of the scholars of the world tell us. Those among the Wise of the World (if any such creature can truly be said to exist) say that He thrills in the act of creation, and having created something, He then grows bored of it, and He tends to move on and create something else, leaving the things that He has created to deal with the inconvenience of their own existence on their own, whether or not He has happened to have endowed them with the wisdom to do so. Many of them, the D.M. had in fact not endowed with the wisdom to do so. Thus, unfortunately, explains the lamentable notion of suicide, which is estimated to claim the lives of some four-fifths of all living beings in the Universe.
But in that primordial age, called by all people "The Center of Time", The D.M brought forth, of His own creativity, the eldest of the planets and stars, and He looked upon them for a while, and He saw that they were good. But then He revisited his old Astronomy textbooks, and discovered that He was going about the process of cosmic creation in the wrong order. (Surprise surprise.)
And The D.M. took thought for the mistake that He had made, and He decided that He would create the great birthplaces of the stars...the gaseous, dusty clouds of the Nebulae...later on, but that He should probably at least figure out something to do with the planets and the stars that he had already caused to be. And thus He arranged them into galaxies, each one supposed to be, with its own particular sheet of unique and vital statistics, transcribed within the "pages" of some mysterious tome called The (Cosmic) Notebook, of which more shall be detailed anon.
And the Learned of the world throughout the centuries have speculated that somehow, the statistics transcribed within The Notebook translate within the Universe as real attributes within existent objects. But this theory, as is the fate of many scientific theories in many different worlds and universes, has been met with the scorn and the ridicule of the superstitious and cainotophobic general public, usually in the form of thrown cabbages, rutabagas, turnips, or other farm produce of the sort, and the learned beings who have espoused what is, among themselves, rather pompously named the “Special Theory of Existent Statistics”, they tend to keep their opinions on the subject more or less to themselves, due to tremendous pressure from the Muncian Church.
The Special Theory of Existent Statistics, itself, was generated within the scientific community, of course, but the concept has in after (or before) days been co-opted by the Muncian Church, as has every idea ever thought by humankind that might ever prove dangerous to the status quo that is kept in place by the ruling order.
The theory is referred to in the Muncian community as “Transcriptions of God (The D.M.)”, and is known to the Reformed Muncians as “Endowments of God (The D.M.)” on a particularly pleasant day, but when they're having a bad day, Reformed Muncians tend to use the much more common “Oh crap, why the hell did I have to be born without the ability to _______?! What the crap, The D.M?! By the way, your name is so lame. What manner of God calls Himself “The D.M.”? Just saying...”
And in those eldest of Ages, The D.M (eventually) brought forth also great nebulae and quasars and black holes and all that stuff(after He had done His astrology homework), and He set them in the deep places of emptiness in between the stars, where His creation was looking a bit on the threadbare side. And this has long perplexed the various persons among the circles of the enlightened, for they have never been able to figure out the precise reason why He had created such a thing as a Black Hole in the first place. For it is known amongst the astronomers of the world that a Black Hole devours the substance of the Universe, and the Wise have often scratched their temples and kicked their feet in frustration, trying to figure out why any sane Intelligence would first create a Universe and then create inside the Universe a great big Void that eats the Universe He just created. And having reflected upon this notion, it is small wonder that many among the Enlightened are, in fact, gone quite mad. Though there have developed theories within the metaphilosophical circles which have seemed to posit that it is The D.M. Himself, and not the mortal being who has perceived the handiwork of The D.M., that is really the crazy one.
But The D.M. named this Universe that He had created a most odd and slighly unsettling name. He named it Slud, although it is not known by any scholar alive just why He had endowed the Universe with such a strange and entirely unattractive name. Perhaps the action of naming something so great and solemn as a Universe such a singularly ugly name speaks to an attitude of irreverence or purposeful impropriety on the part of The D.M. Or perhaps He just simply found it humorous to name a Universe such a thing. Many theories have arisen throughout the Ages, with the specific purpose of answering this particular question. Indeed, entire branches of science have developed just to examine why it is that The D.M. would sum up the entirety of the being of an entire Universe in one extremely unattractive syllable such as “Slud”. The members of the Slud family, who of course also bear that name, have been known at times to note that the very notion of an entire branch of the sciences devoted to discovering why the D.M. would name the Universe what He did is, at the very same time, both flattering and really rather insulting. Suffice it to say, the members of the Slud family tend to be rather satisfied with the name of the Universe. Of course, it must be acknowledged that they, themselves, might very well be biased.
At any rate, with regards to the question of why The D.M. chose the name he did for the Universe, it is a possibility acknowledged by the author of this document, that The D.M. might have been inebriated at the time. Such an explanation, the author believes, would indeed account for much of the inherent absurdity which is present in the very processes of life. However, in the interest of candor, the author admits that He cannot be entirely certain on that score.
What is known, however, is that The D.M. apparently found the name amusing enough to use again and again, for He had made also a planet by that name, and it is upon Planet Slud that the events of the following tales, some great and some merely okay at best, have taken (or will take) place. And many of those events include yet another manifestation of the incredibly strange name, this being Slud (the Family), members of which family were mentioned in the preceding paragraphs. But the Slud Family came later (or earlier, depending upon how one looks at it), and the lives and the exploits of the most famous of that bloodline are known to historians. That is to say, known to the historians which have survived the process of Sophiasplosion detailed in another chapter of this volume. And so, consequentially, the tales of the Slud Family will be elaborated upon at another place within this document, and shall be treated with greater detail within that section.
And having created the Universe (and the Planet) of Slud, for even thus had He done upon the First Day, The D.M., being quite lazy as all the Enlightened know, decided at that point to finish up for the Day. And it was here that He met with an peculiar sort of problem. For, you see, Day itself did not yet exist within the Universe or the Planet of Slud, for the D.M. had not yet created them. And after a hearty facepalm at his own lack of attention to detail, Day and Night themselves the D.M. created by His Thought and His Will, and He wrote Them even thus upon the pages of The (Cosmic) Notebook, thus making them a reality within the Universe.
It is interesting, though not particularly relevant, for the author to note here that when The D.M. created Day and Night, He had not yet created Time Zones, so it quite literally was 8 in the morning everywhere in the world simultaneously. But after The D.M. had created Day and Night, (and then time zones as an afterthought), He rested, for He had a long day of job-hunting before Him in the world of his own residence.
Upon His return to the Universe upon the Second Day, The D.M. set Himself to the task of creating life to live upon Slud (the Planet). He created first a great firmament of the waters above, and He looked upon it and He named it “Sky”. And He made also the waters, which He gathered into a great Ocean upon Slud (the Planet). And The D.M. caused great pillars of fire to burst forth from the center of the world, and to sear the bed of the great Ocean, and these were the eldest of Volcanoes upon Slud (the Planet).
But the fires of the deeps met with the waters of the Ocean and they cooled. And wherever the fire of the deeps cooled, there the fire hardened into stone, and many successive layers of stone were laid upon one another, so that in time, some of the stone had grown tall above even the surface of the waters. Even thus is it believed by geologists that the the first continent on Slud developed and rose from the sea. And The D.M. looked upon the land that he had caused to be, and He saw that it was good...sort of.
But, as has been mentioned, The D.M. was bored. That is to say, He was still bored, even though He had created the stars and planets and the ocean and continent. So, for some reason that seemed perfectly sensible to Him at the time, He cast lightning from His fist into the waters, idly, and badly, skipping bolts of electricity across the surface of the great Ocean as one might skip a pebble across the surface of a pond, while He pondered what should be the next thing that He would make. But when the lightning struck the waters, there formed many tiny little droplets of water, each forming a "skin" of water tension to encompass all things inside them, and each containing within them the elements of life. There were within these primal droplets proteins and amino acids and the essential metals which compose living beings, and the minute quantities of these building blocks of life that were present within the tiny droplets were even thus charged into activity by the Holy Lightning of the the Creator-God. And The D.M., at first, did not see that it was good.
For The D.M. did not at first notice what it was that He had done, and He took thought, and He took thought, and He took thought yet even more upon the subject of exactly which life to create. And then He paused to eat a sandwich. He enjoyed the sandwich very much, and He tasted that it was good.
After the sandwich, however, The D.M. labored upon something He called “homework”, for something He called “Statistics class”, but that appears to have only peripheral bearing upon the History of Slud (the Universe), therefore the Author shall leave off of entering into too much detail upon that particular subject, but rather shall he take up the tale again at another point in time, when The D.M. was not quite so...preoccupied.
And Behold! The D.M., who is God to the entire Universe of Slud (and by extension, is God to the Planet and the Family as well), He returned to the world, and He saw then the tiny droplets of life that He had made, saying, “Ahhh, but this be truly a wonder, that I have caused to gather within these tiny spheres of water all the required substances from which the the great work of life might be constructed. Therefore, I go to my task, for I will finish in earnest the great work I have begun in ignorance.”
And doubtless, The D.M. was comfortable in making this confession of His ignorance, only but for the fact that there were, as yet, no living things around him that were capable of hearing his candid admission, and thus none could shame Him with their comprehension. Some there were in later (or earlier) Ages who thought to question how any might know that The D.M., in fact, made this statement at all. However, those people subsequently exploded, so the question has never really been settled.
But The D.M. caused more of the fires of the deep to rise from their molten source, and in several locations did mighty volcanoes arise, which warmed the seas, and which acquired more substance unto themselves throughout the eons of the Center of Time. But the warmth of the seas caused the droplets to fuse together, and thus bonded to one another, the droplets became living cells of greater, more complex, and more evolved creatures by the will of The D.M.
And of these cells of life, The D.M. made algae and sponges and the fish of the sea, and He started making from these primal creatures yet even more complex beasts that could leave behind the waters of the Ocean and go forth to walk even upon dry land. And some of those creatures grew well there. Indeed, in the time of when these land creatures waxed to their greatest population and mightiest stature, they evolved to be tall and majestic, some so great as to blot out the sun. One such creature, a great reptilian beast known as Rexasaurus Tyre, so thoroughly evolved towards the end of becoming such a great predator that no creature before or after has ever achieved its deadly efficiency in the hunt.
The creatures of the D.M.'s first creation achieved a pinnacle of evolution rarely seen in any universe, and in their time they dominated the entire landmass of Slud and a sizable portion of its sea also, and endured in continuous evolution for a span of time thought by modern paleontologists to have been at least two hundred million years.
But that was all, of course, very boring to the Creator-God, and The D.M. decided that He wanted to do something different. This would indicate, apparently, that The D.M., in addition to being lazy and lacking in common-sense, also suffered from a case of attention-deficit disorder.
So that He might wipe clean His mistakes, The D.M. sent a comet against Slud. (The Planet, of course, not the Universe). The comet big enough to wipe out the whole Universe would have had to be huge, and, much to the gratitude of the inhabitants of Slud (The Universe), The D.M. was too lazy to think of sending that one. But the Comet sent by The D.M. wiped away much of what He had created, and the whole affair has since been regarded by historians as a rather irresponsible act for Him to commit, and really, just a sort of a terrible idea.
But The D.M. created new plants and animals to take the place of those which He had destroyed, and He filled the world of Slud once again with teeming life, but eventually, after that, The D.M. again got bored with creating a bunch of plants and animals. And thus He decided to start on a new piece of work to entertain Him, and He thought that perhaps He would create beasts who could think, and reason, after a fashion, and take thoughts of their own. He called them human beings.
Subtitle: "Creation Rule #1: It is recommended to at least have a College-Level Education before attempting to create a Universe..."
Now, human beings were a bit trickier to create. The reason for this, the D.M. realized, was that if He were to create a species of creatures who were to exist solely to entertain Him, He would have to endow them with complex personalities. He also, He knew, would have to endow them with emotions, and an ability to adapt to their environment, and He would also have to bestow upon them the intellect to be able to think beyond the merest horizons of basic survival (and how well humans seem thus far to have accomplished that...). All these factors taken in the aggregate, it is quite clear that all this would not have been very easy for a being known to be lazy and lacking in common sense to have accomplished.
As a peculiar consequence of the laziness of The D.M., however, He created many creatures without distinguishable personalities, and they exist to this very day, and are called, collectively, the Blandred, because they're boring and they do not really stand out all that much. Some few humans, however, finding themselves with more time on their hands than they knew how to properly utilize, have taken the effort to classify and give names to particular subtypes of Blandred, though few, other than those with too much time on their hands, have reason to care much.
But as for humans, The D.M. created three human beings at first, two males and a female, for He thought that by thus creating more males than females, they would amuse Him by doing all sorts of strange and foolish things to impress each other. But because The D.M. is lazy, He never bothered to remove from humans the mating-instinct of primal mammals, and because He is not the most common-sensical of fellows, He said, “Ah, why not?! I shall leave these humans that I have made as they are. For it shall be entertaining to Me to see how they develop.” That, of course, turned out to be a mistake. The author of this volume must ruefully note that the D.M. seems to make a lot of those.
And Behold! Before The D.M. could get around to explaining things to the humans, and establishing some ground rules for how they should treat each other, the three Humans of Slud (the Planet) discovered mating and reproduction quite on their own, and one of the males destroyed the other during the first week of their existence in a fight over the affections of the female. The female, of course, having witnessed a murder for her own sake, was somewhat distressed emotionally by this incident. And by "somewhat distressed", the author of this volume seeks to downplay the fact that this first ancestress of the Human Species discovered that rare condition known as "catatonia", and it endured thus with her for a long time ere she ever recovered her wits and her psyche sufficiently.
And The D.M. was very angry that this crime of murder had happened, so He cast a dreadful judgment upon the two surviving humans (who, by the by, were named Al and Evelyn), that they should forever have to live with each other until the very last day of their lives, and that they would have to put up with each other's often overly-exaggerated gripings by whichever means they were able to discover. By the judgment of The D.M., therefore, they were compelled to build a home and live together, and listen to one another as they complained about how badly their day had gone at work. And sometimes they would be kind to each other, but more often than not, they would bicker back and forth, usually at mealtimes. And this also grew dreadfully boring for The D.M.. Indeed, it grew so utterly tiresome for The D.M. that He began to regret picking the living humans to inherit the earth, instead of choosing the corpse.
But eventually, the two humans were able to put aside their differences enough to have children, and throughout the past and the future (or maybe both, whichever the case may be), they proved to be a fruitful and numerous species, although indeed, theirs was a strange and even dysfunctional existence. For The D.M. had created humankind upon the model of another form of Humankind which existed outside the boundaries of the Universe, within that different, subjective Universe in which the D.M. Himself resided, and that model of humankind we are given to understand was built with the ability...indeed, even the need...to experience time in an orderly progression from beginning to end, upon a linear path.
Yet time flows outward from the middle within the Universe of Slud, and thus, as the beings of Slud (the Planet) were born and lived their lives, they often found themselves often within different time-epochs on different sides of the middle of Time than their kindred. And humans being thus separated from their kindred by barriers of Time in such a world, it was very easy for men and women to fall through sinkholes in the fabric of Time, and be stranded in other eras than their own, although it was virtually impossible to fall back into one's own Time in precisely the same place one had been located previously, or even at all. As a consequence of this, Grandparents found themselves living in what should have been, to them, the distant future, ages after their grandchildren had died of old age, and Brothers and Sisters and Cousins found themselves also vainly attempting to communicate with each other throughout the long years which separated them from each other.
So it was that, despite the fact that the human species was fruitful and multiplied, they were not able to build much of a society, since they existed in different times from each other, and the languages they spoke were themselves a product of the unique and peculiar circumstances of the time periods in which they lived, and thus the humans of Slud had no way of seriously cooperating with each other, or even communicating at all effectively with each other through time.
Thus humankind pretty much just lived in caves and went out every once in a while and threw some spears at several of the species of the local Blandred, who, being very boring creatures as has already been mentioned, would probably not have been missed anyways. (Blandred might be terribly boring, but they make for decent and nutritious eating, if not particularly appetizing eating. Thus, the various faunal species of Blandred formed the foundation of pre...or post...historic Man's diet.)
Beyond a simple hunter-gatherer lifestyle, however, in which people stranded in the same era banded together loosely into wary and confused associations that have been called Time-Tribes, humankind could not progress further in the evolution of their social being, for they could not muster the conversation and cooperation with each other that is necessary for the development of a sophisticated society. And The D.M. saw that this was not good, for their destiny had not been intended to be stuck forever in a state of suspended development. That fate, as all the Universe knows, was reserved only for those who placed importance upon the realm of politics...
Seeing the terrible debacle that had been made of human existence as a consequence of the messed-up progression of Time, The D.M. resolved to fix the Time problem once and for all. (Well, that particular Time problem, anyways. It created other problems, which will be elaborated further at different parts of this publication.) And having less common sense than He should have had, He devised an overly complex solution than He should have, and because He was lazy and didn't really feel like teaching all the people the same thing over and over again, He opted instead to select one person from among all the human beings upon Slud (the Planet) to be the official Time-Keeper and reveal the newly-revised system of Time.
As the Annals of Sluddish History, such as they are, were to detail within their not-so-hallowed pages, it is told that The D.M. selected for this most important deed a young man named Joshua Calendar to fill that post, and the life of that particular youth would never be the same.
